Thursday, October 20, 2011

Burnie Burns

Burnie Burns is the founder of Rooster Teeth Productions. He spoke to Texas State students about machinima and his web video series Red Vs. Blue. Machinima is created by taking animation from video games and putting a voice track over it. In other words, Burnie Burns makes shows for video games. Burns takes concepts from video games and creates stories that are as real life as possible. He makes shows that he would want to watch and use.

Red Vs. Blue is a hybrid model machinima animation. The artists that worked on Red Vs. Blue were people that they found online doing things for fun or as their hobby. Burnie Burns plays as an actor in most of his michinima productions by doing the voices for some of his game characters. Other actors also contribute to the voices, making the productions a team effort. Burns writes the scripts for all his games and takes suggestions from the rest of his team as well.

The Red Vs. Blue script is very serial because you know all the characters and what is going on. The stories are told over a period of time and has seasons just like shows such as Gossip Girl. Burns interacts with the audience to see what they are liking and not liking. He plans to make 10 seasons of these animated shows and has had 1 billion hits so far. He is now a licensed partner with microsoft.

He also told us that there are 728 million views on youtube and that there are 36 hours of video uploaded to youtube every hour. My favorite part of his interview was when he showed us the youtube video of "crackdown 2 orbs." He found a polish man on youtube who recorded his voice while playing this video game. The youtube video consisted of the man cursing while playing the video game. It was hilarious so he hired him and paid him to keep making these videos.

Burns said he hires people that are good artists, animators, and people with experience in web video production. When asked where he sees web video going he said mobile. The advise he gave to students was to put your work out there on the Internet because you never know what people are going to like and how many hits your going to get. You have to make something great and at the same time get attention for it by marketing through facebook, twitter and other social media.